I had arrived downtown early for a meeting and needed to kill some time. Unfamiliar with the area, I decided my best bet for entertainment (the type you can get away with in a small town during the afternoon) was the local coffee shop. There I hoped to pick up a copy of The New Yorker and take my mind off the mind-numbing staff meeting that awaited me.

Opening the door, the smell of stale, burnt coffee assaulted my nose. I wondered to myself what was keeping a place such as this in business, because it clearly wasn’t the coffee. That’s when I saw her. She wore a vintage Ramones t-shirt, an old pair of jeans, a smile to kill for but not a hint of makeup. She was not of this world.

I took my place at the bar beside the other twenty and thirty-something men, all flocked in front of the espresso machine like college students to a pizza shop at 3:00 AM.

Waving a five in front of me, I said “Coffee, please” in my best Hollywood voice. As she took my money, her had ever so slightly brushed mine. I was hers.